Of a kindred character was the formal separation of the places assigned to the senatorial order from those occupied by the rest of the multitude as spectators at the national festivals.  It was the great Scipio, who effected this change in his second consulship in 560.  The national festival was as much an assembly of the people as were the centuries convoked for voting; and the circumstance that the former had no resolutions to pass made the official announcement of a distinction between the ruling order and the body of subjects—­which the separation implied—­all the more significant.  The innovation accordingly met with much censure even from the ruling class, because it was simply invidious and not useful, and because it gave a very manifest contradiction to the efforts of the more prudent portion of the aristocracy to conceal their exclusive government under the forms of civil equality.

The Censorship a Prop of the Nobility

These circumstances explain, why the censorship became the pivot of the later republican constitution; why an office, originally standing by no means in the first rank, came to be gradually invested with external insignia which did not at all belong to it in itself and with an altogether unique aristocratic-republican glory, and was viewed as the crown and completion of a well-conducted public career; and why the government looked upon every attempt of the opposition to introduce their men into this office, or even to hold the censor responsible to the people for his administration during or after his term of office, as an attack on their palladium, and presented a united front of resistance to every such attempt.  It is sufficient in this respect to mention the storm which the candidature of Cato for the censorship provoked, and the measures, so extraordinarily reckless and in violation of all form, by which the senate prevented the judicial prosecution of the two unpopular censors of the year 550.  But with their magnifying the glory of the censorship the government combined a characteristic distrust of this, their most important and for that very reason most dangerous, instrument.  It was thoroughly necessary to leave to the censors absolute control over the personal composition of the senate and the equites; for the right of exclusion could not well be separated from the right of summoning, and it was indispensable to retain such a right, not so much for the purpose of removing from the senate capable men of the opposition—­a course which the smooth-going government of that age cautiously avoided—­as for the purpose of preserving around the aristocracy that moral halo, without which it must have speedily become a prey to the opposition.  The right of ejection was retained; but what they chiefly needed was the glitter of the naked blade—­the edge of it, which they feared, they took care to blunt.  Besides the check involved in the nature of the office—­under which the lists of the members of the aristocratic